dinsdag 22 oktober 2013

A first-ever talking and walking 'bionic man' constructed entirely out of synthetic body parts has been presented at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot has a human face and it cost $1 million to build.
It was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.

A "bionic man" was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show "The Six Million Dollar Man" showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died, reports Reuters.

"The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today - one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?" said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from theUniversity of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.

"This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development," museum director John Dailey said.
The robot - the evidence of medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs - has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.

The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb.

He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.

The Incredible Bionic Man: Giving a Face to the Incredible

"It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy," said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.
The bionic creation's artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.
"The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," he said. "So, he's not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with."Source: http://www.messagetoeagle.com/bionicrobot.php#.UmZbY_nIby0